Jan. 16, 2008
building antennas/fixing things/installing them
Wow it is so much fun to make thing out of the stuff you have laying around the house. You can make it cheaper sometimes better and to your standards. It even better when what you have built out does the manufactured product. I have a homemade antenna on top of the house made out of model railroad track and it performs just as well as my factory made base station antenna. This will probably bore most people so change the subject kind of. This weekend Jan. 19-20 is ARRL VHF/UHF radio sweepstakes contest. In this contest Hams all around the country will be trying to get as many contacts as possible in as many different grid squares as possible(grid squares are like latitude and longitude lines only they are used in ham radio for determining location). The difference with this contest and the thing that make so much different is that the frequencies used are much shorter ranged then HF and more line of sight so it is a lot more fun when you get a 100 or even 200 mile away contact! for more info
PLEASE VISIT---www.arrl.org---
Just for the fun of it and if you do not know line of sight is determined by how high up your antenna is and the distance because the farther away you are the lower the horizion is, which is because of the curvature of the earth. some of this distance can be overcome by putting more power out of the radio, putting the antenna higher up, using a direction antenna(this directs all the power in one direction instead of in all directions), or waiting of good atmospheric conditions where a signal can get trapped between two air masses and bounce through what is called a DUCT over long distances.
I love making contact and even the community service parts it is fun hobby. You should Check it out if you love build things, Watch Storms, Tincker, or just talk on the radio. |
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